STG Does it Again

After a few months of dormancy, for which I apologize, having built momentum the past few years, life got in the way and I let the Blog "slip" into near obscurity since the last quarter of 2010. I am now re-committed to breathing life back into this feature of FTLOP's homepage and will do my best to keep it moving along with far more frequency.

My first foray back to blog-dom is a recounting of a recent tasting held in our home for the STG, (self-proclaimed, Seattle Tasting Group) which has been going strong since 2003. We normally do this "year-end-tasting" at … well, the end of the year. Unfortunately, schedules being over burdened during the 2010 holiday season, there were too many conflicts and coming up with a mutually beneficial date, lead us all the way into late January.

I have been a part of many a tasting group over the past two decades, at least half of which I've organized from inception and I can say that this particular group has the finest synchronicity of any that I've belonged to. There are eight of us in total, from all over the Seattle metro-area, with a spread of about 35 years between our youngest and oldest member.

These wine loving friends with great diversity amongst our wine collections makes for an eclectic, yet very strong group dynamic. We've had a dozen other members who've come and gone over the years, yet at no other time was the group ever more cohesive than now. Only three of those original members remain today, some having moved etc., but several others have been with us for more than five years now. Like any hobby, people's interests ebb and flow and the continuity of this group has created some enduring friendships.

Now onto the tasting. In the early years, I used to have a guest chef come in and prepare various courses over the six hours that our group makes its way through a bunch of themed wine flights. There was always a "mystery guest" who joined us and that was fun for several years. Nowadays, I just suck it up and do the cooking myself and we've stuck to just the core 8 sans guest.